MOSCOW, 30 Sept. 2003 -- “I love you.”
It’s really nice to hear, even from a 19-year-old.
Maybe especially from a 19-year-old when he’s calling you from someplace 1500 km away that you can’t even pronounce.
Shurik left rather hastily after the three of us – Yegor, Shurik, and I – decided to try to go to Prague for Christmas.
One problem: Shurik didn’t have a “grand passport.” They use this moniker to distinguish what for us is just a regular passport from the internal passport, or identity card, that every Russian must carry from the age of 14. They are astounded that Americans don’t have to carry identity cards.
“How do you solve crimes?” they ask in amazement. Actually much better without internal passports than the Russians do with them. Their unsolved crime rate makes Al Capone’s Chicago look like a Mary Poppins kindergarten.
Anyway, no international passport. Hasty conference: Only one solution. He’ll have to return home, go to all the local ministries to get the papers he needs to prove he’s a live Russian, then dump them all on somebody’s desk and wait.
So while “the twins” were attending the Mariah Carey concert at the Kremlin Palace last Saturday night, Shurik was getting ready for his 36-hour train ride. He and I had already had sex yesterday morning while nobody was around, and thinking of being without him for at least the next couple of weeks dampened my mood. So our farewell was a lingering, 45-minute marathon.
At the end of this, a little weak with wonder and spent passion (nice phrase), I told him – in Russian, since he knows almost no English, “I’m not sure, but I think I love you a little bit.”
I didn’t understand his reply, and didn’t want to give the impression I was recording it for some gay Internet blog or something, so I didn’t ask him to repeat it; but I hoped maybe it was something like, “I love you, too.”
Anyway, we kissed a long, deep, final adieu and off he went on the metro to the Kurskaya Train Station enroute to something-or-other-vodsk in the Caucuses.
He promised he would miss his new “family” and was careful to give me his phone number so we could stay in touch. The best time to call, he said, would be Monday evening about 10:00.
I told Yegor what I had told Shurik.. “I love him, too,” Yegor agreed, adding hastily: But not sexually.”
Yegor and I bought a phone card because I can’t dial long distance calls on my phone because – I don’t even know why. I just can’t. For nine months now I haven’t been able to dial outside Moscow. The good news is my long-distance. phone bill has been cut to zero. No more surprise 50-dollar night calls to Zimbabwe.
On Monday evening Yegor and I started calling at 9 p.m. First a busy signal; then interminable ringing, no answer. Ditto all day Tuesday.
Tuesday evening the phone rang. Shurik? Shurik!
“I miss you all. I’m having a great time with my friends; my mother’s fine, but there’s been a problem with the phone, which will be fixed in two-three days. Call me after that. My visa will be ready in two weeks.”
And then, in struggling English: “I love you.”
Ah, rapture!
I knew he wasn’t talking to Anton or Yegor. I was the only one on the line.
Even if he didn’t mean it; or even if he thought he meant it, but at 19 didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant; and even if he does have a girl-friend back in something-or-other-Vodsk that I’ve seen entirely too many pictures of; it still gave my batteries a 12-volt boost to hear him say:
“I love you.”
If you’ve been around a while, you sort of assume when a 19-year-old tells you he loves you, he’s doing it either because a) he thinks it’s expected of him within the social context, as Andrei Tioufline used to do; or b) he’s sucking up to you for money, as Max and Tioufline both used to do.
But you always hold out for that slim possibility that he may actually love you, even if he’s 19 and you’re 70 -- especially after you’ve had sex several times and he seems to really enjoy it and to enjoy your company, going places with you, bullshitting with you.
To an American, this sounds like either fiction or outrageous manipulation. But Russians don’t have the same abhorrence of age that we do. My worst nightmare when I was Shurik’s age would have been the thought of having sex with me.
But repeatedly my young Russian friends have dismissed age as irrelevant. I was trying to explain to Anton one time why I was in no hurry to return to what for most Russians remains the promised land, the land of milk and honey. “I could never have sex with a 23-year-old in America like I do here,” I told him.
He looked genuinely perplexed, then shrugged: “Age just isn’t important to me.”
Nor, thanks gods -- as many of my Russian friends not quite correctly say -- is it to many, maybe even most, young Russian gays.
Shurik is very young. Our relationship, if you can call it that, is very young. In addition to being young, he’s naive and inexperienced. But that also makes him very real -- what we used to refer to in Iowa as aw-shucks-golly-gee bony fidee..
Russians are much more reluctant to use the “L” word than are we Americans. We tend to fall in love every time we have sex. In fact, the mating call of the American male might well be, “I lo-lo-lo-lo-hoooooove you. Gasp, gasp, gasp.”
But Russians are usually much more matter-of-fact about it. They don’t feel constrained to declare their undying love with every orgasm.
Yegor often tells me he loves me, because he does.
Anton and Misha have never told me they love me, because they don’t.
I think Shurik is as honest as Anton and Misha, and if he says he loves me, it’s because he does.
Well, that’s what I want to think.
They say that being in love gives your brain the same kind of jolt as a snort of coke. Maybe that’s why I always feel like I’m about two feet off the ground.
I get the same high as a coke-head, but without the paranoia. And it’s a lot cheaper.
So we’ll try to call Shurik again tonight. My buzz is wearing off.
